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Full-Text Articles in Law
This Is Just Not Working For Us: Why After Ten Years On The Job- It Is Time To Fire Garcetti, Jason Zenor
This Is Just Not Working For Us: Why After Ten Years On The Job- It Is Time To Fire Garcetti, Jason Zenor
Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest
In Lane v. Franks, the U.S. Supreme Court held that public employees who give truthful testimony in court are protected so long as it was outside their ordinary job duties. This issue arose after ten years of the Garcetti rule which does not protect employee speech pursuant to their job duties- a nebulous topic in the digital era. In applying Garcetti, lower courts have extended it to include any speech that is a product of job duties, even if it would serve the public interest. In Lane v. Franks, the Court amended the employee speech doctrine to protect …
Content-Based Confusion And Panhandling: Muddling A Weathered First Amendment Doctrine Takes Its Toll On Society's Less Fortunate, Clay Calvert
Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest
This article examines multiple problems now plaguing the fundamental dichotomy in First Amendment jurisprudence between content-based and content-neutral regulations of speech. The troubles were highlighted by the U.S. Supreme Court's 2014 divided decision in McCullen v. Coakley. Building from McCullen, this article uses a quartet of federal court rulings from 2014 and 2013 involving anti-begging ordinances affecting the homeless as analytical springboards for examining these issues in depth. Ultimately, the article proposes a three-step framework for mitigating the muddle and calls on the nation's high court to take action to clarify the proper test for distinguishing between content-based and content-neutral …
Religious Freedom Legislation In The 2013 Virginia General Assembly, Ellis M. West
Religious Freedom Legislation In The 2013 Virginia General Assembly, Ellis M. West
Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest
This article consists of the following sections: Section one presents the content of the proposed amendment and explains the ways in which it is unclear, redundant, and otherwise poorly written. Section two addresses the issue of whether the provisions intended to protect religious expression, including prayer, are necessary and can solve the problems they are intended to solve. It also identifies the crucial challenge in cases involving religious expression - namely, determining correctly whether it is the government or a private individual or group that is expressing or promoting a religious belief or practice. This determination must be made because …
Reclaiming Hazelwood: Public School Classrooms And A Return To The Supreme Court's Vision For Viewpoint-Specific Speech Regulation Policy, Brad Dickens
Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest
Federal and circuit courts continue to fiercely debate whether the Supreme Court's 1988 ruling in Hazelwood v. Kuhineier requires school policies regulating student speech and expression to be viewpoint neutral. However, this note suggests that the language of Hazelwood itself shows that the Circuit debate may be misguided. The Supreme Court intended Hazelwood to stand as a narrow exception to its earlier holding in Tinker, and Hazelwood only applies in instances where the government's own voice is implicated, largely in a public context. When the school, and in effect the government, is speaking with its own voice, the school must …
The Chill Bill: The Hate Crimes Prevention Act Of 2007 And The Forgotten Dangers To The First Amendment, Hank Gates
The Chill Bill: The Hate Crimes Prevention Act Of 2007 And The Forgotten Dangers To The First Amendment, Hank Gates
Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest
This comment will address whether the Hate Crimes Prevention Act is unconstitutionally overbroad in violation of the First Amendment because it threatens to chill protected speech. Part II will outline the text of the House Bill 1592 as passed by the House of Representatives. Part III will outline the United States Supreme Court's overbreadth doctrine in its current form and the Supreme Court's major decisions on hate crime legislation in the past. Part IV will evaluate the potential dangers that the Act, in its current form, poses to protected speech. Ultimately, this comment concludes that Congress can draft hate crimes …
Rumsfeld V. Forum For Academic And Institutional Rights, Inc.:By Allowing Military Recruiters On Campus, Are Law Schoolsadvocating "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"?, Braxton Williams
Rumsfeld V. Forum For Academic And Institutional Rights, Inc.:By Allowing Military Recruiters On Campus, Are Law Schoolsadvocating "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"?, Braxton Williams
Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest
The freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment encompasses more than mere spoken words; it also protects conduct that has an expressive quality, such as flag burning.' In the important case of United States v. O'Brien, the United States Supreme Court appeared to narrow these sorts of protections in cases where there is a sufficient government interest in prosecuting actions, such as burning draft cards, and when such acts are noncommunicative. After the Supreme Court's recent holding in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, Inc., the O'Brien holding's limitation on First Amendment protection for expressive conduct appears …
An Examination Of The United States Supreme Court's Recent Establishment Clause Rulings In Mccreary County, Ky. V. American Civil Liberties Union And Van Order V. Perry, Joanna L. Suyes
Richmond Journal of Law and the Public Interest
Responding to a question concerning whether or not his followers should pay taxes to the Roman government, the Bible records that Jesus answered, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's." This statement, quoted in the Bible's Gospel of Matthew, has been called one of the "most revolutionary and history-making utterances that ever fell from those lips divine.",While the famous words of Jesus make clear the existence of a distinction between the realms of religion and government, they shed little light on the type of balance that should be struck between them.